25,000 sue Facebook over privacy

This particular legal action is over in Austria where there's a class action lawsuit going down thanks to alleged privacy violations and apparent participation in the US National Security Agency's (NSA) PRISM programme. A law graduate called Max Schrems is heading up the case on behalf of 25,000 or so Facebook users based in Europe and beyond.

Some of the users being represented are from the UK and Ireland.

Schrems, at the hearing, is going to say that the social network took an approach to data protection which was akin to the "Wild West", adding: "Basically, we are asking Facebook to stop mass surveillance, to (have) a proper privacy policy that people can understand, but also to stop collecting data of people that are not even Facebook users."

"There is a wide number of issues in the lawsuit and we hope to kind of win all of them and to get a landmark case against US data-gathering companies."

Schrems is hoping for compensation of somewhere in the region of £360 for every user.

1 comment

1 year agoHeinz W.

That these companies blatantly gathered information illegally should be shut down and removed from the internet like a child porn site. Western governments are behind this, calling it terrorism protection. If they weren't causing terroristic acts to others in the first place, we wouldn't have the problem in the second place, controlling people and now the world behind a blanket of lies, the government is responsible for all this chaos and has lost all integrity with it's people, and you can take that to bank.